11.
Reed
I was awoken in the middle of the night by the call, jarring me out of a fitful sleep. Isabella was breathing softly by my side, but even she was wakened by the buzz of my phone. I rolled over in the peaceful darkness of our apartment and fumbled past my hand lotion (they get dry in winter in Minnesota, come on), the pad of paper and pens, and finally to my cell phone charger next to the bed. I damned near fumbled it in my sleepy clumsiness, but managed to hit the unlock button and push it to my ear. “Hello?” I asked blearily.
“It’s Miranda,” came the calm voice at the other end of the line, and for a second my stomach dropped, remembering that when last I’d left consciousness, my sister had been on the run in Scotland. My brain decided to jump to conclusions, and as my breath stuck in my throat I wondered if her next words were going to be, “I’m sorry—she’s dead.”
But they weren’t. Instead: “We’ve received an emergency request for assistance from a little town outside Odessa, Texas. They’ve got a hostage situation involving a metahuman.”
My heart, a second earlier feeling like it was thudding toward two hundred beats per minute and an explosion, suddenly stilled. “Okay. When do they want us there?”
“Yesterday, if you could travel through time,” she said. “They’ve got the place surrounded, but this person—the hostage-taker—they’ve got a family barricaded in a house. Mother and small children.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Okay. I can catch a plane when the airport starts up—”
“No.” Her voice was solid, iron in the middle of the night, like a wall I was running up against. “I’ve already booked a private jet. It’ll leave as soon as you get to Eden Prairie airport. Pack lightly.”
“Who’s riding shotgun with me?” I asked. Technically, I could pick anyone I wanted, but I guessed that she’d have already called or texted someone else to get them moving, and I had a suspicion who it’d be.
“Angel,” she said flatly, and I rolled my eyes a little, but shrugged. Angel was all right, I guess, but I preferred Jamal, Scott or Augustus to watch my back, mostly because I’d been working with them for years and Angel for about six months. She was a fireball, but I could see the advantage in sending her. She spoke Spanish fluently, which had been useful on more than one occasion in Texas, and she was Miranda’s cousin.
Downside: she liked to drive. Always. And she was dangerously good at it, but it felt like she was always about half a heartbeat from putting whatever rental car we were in through the highway dividers and off the road into the ditch. She was that kind of maniac, the kind that liked to play with the manual gear-switching feature on high-end cars. Personally, I let my car make those sorts of decisions for me, but not Angel.
“Okay,” I said. “You know, I could just fly myself. Grab one of the guys on the way—”
“This will be faster, and, as a side benefit, legal,” she said, and I didn’t feel like arguing. I didn’t really love gliding through the clouds at high altitude without a plane to protect me anyway, not over long distances like Minnesota to Texas. I could do it, but I didn’t love it.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” I said, and hung up, clicking the lamp next to the bed as I rolled over the side. I rubbed my eyes, the bedroom shown in dim light.
“Where are you going this time?” Isabella asked, turning over in bed to look at me. She was still beautiful in the middle of the night, her makeup all rubbed off before bed and a pair of woolen pajamas with a sky-blue-with-white-polka-dots pattern not at all like the old Victoria’s Secret Collection she’d worn to bed every night when we first started sleeping together.
“Somewhere in Texas,” I said, rubbing at my eyes. I kept a ready bag packed, so that was going to be easy. All I had to do was throw on some clothes and get the hell out of here. Maybe I’d fly myself to the airport—no. No, it’d probably be better if I didn’t, since Governor Shipley had technically cancelled my flight privileges over the state at the same time she’d yanked Sienna’s. She was up for re-election this year, and I was voting for the other guy.
“When will you be back?” That Isabella asked this at all was a measure of how much this Sienna situation had knotted her up without my realizing it. I looked back at her, and for once I could see the concern playing through the coolness she wore like a second skin. I couldn’t tell whether it was because she was worried that I’d worry while on assignment and end up getting myself hurt, or because just the general pervading sense of concern that Sienna had gotten in trouble overseas reminded her of my own mortality. Either way, there was something here that I hadn’t necessarily seen in other departures I’d made.
“As soon as I can,” I said gently, and leaned over to kiss her. “Ever since we took out the supply operations for that cartel that was bringing the meta serums from Revelen, business has been slacking off. We could use this payday.”
“It’s not worth your life,” she said.
“It’s not just my life on the line,” I said. “This crook, whoever it is—they’ve taken hostages.”
She seemed to take this information in, and then she nodded, inscrutable. “Hurry back,” was all she said.
“You know I won’t linger,” I said with a sly smile, and leaned down to kiss her again before I got up, heading for the closet to get dressed. I didn’t have long, after all, and I couldn’t afford to spend my time distracted about Isabella’s worry, or Sienna—whatever was going on with her.
It was time for me to get back to work. And Sienna, wherever she was…she’d be just fine.